A rendezvous with Rauf

In the end, all politics is local. While we are still talking about accelerated economic development for the greatest benefit of the greatest number, it is meet to report on the latest efforts in the regional integration department. For the past one week, snooper has been trampling and traversing some major intellectual and economic powerhouses of American global supremacy with Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, the energetic and indefatigable governor of Osun State, Nigeria.

Snooper often relishes the role of intellectual mugger and bouncer all rolled into one, and it has been a memorable cultural and cerebral feast. From Harvard in Cambridge, Boston, through the Carnegie Mellon empire in Pittsburgh to Howard University in Washington, snooper was there, sparring and not sparing and with the fury of an ageing boxer threatened by terminal retirement.

The aim of the visit is two-fold. First, to avail potential investors, particularly well-heeled Nigerians in the Diaspora, of the bold and visionary developmental strides undertaken by the Osun state government. Secondly, to test the main intellectual planks of the regional developmental paradigm against the critical interrogation of an academic audience that does not take kindly to flabby-minded drooling and empty posturing.

It was going to be very hard to convince an audience steeped in western hegemony that there is no single monolithic route to modernisation and economic development. Western modernity is just one version of the multiple narratives through which human development can be framed. There was nothing preordained or inevitable about it. The advanced society does not wear a single coluration or complexion. Aregbesola spoke convincingly to these issues without being fazed or overwhelmed by the distinguished audience. Only the massively self-assured could go to a Harvard teeming with monetary school cold warriors to defend the importance of Keynesian economics and massive state intervention

Perhaps snooper should drop an ironic mea culpa for all those who equate regional integration with a secessionist ploy. Aregbesola was once accused of being the political arrowhead of this separatist agenda with snooper duly fingered as its intellectual godfather by the same columnist. This usually perceptive chap ought to know much better, but that is a matter for another day. If one is going to be intimidated by an animal with horns, it is not going to be a snail.

Next week, snooper would bring the full report of the trip. It was not just an intellectual tour de force, it was also socially engaging. Among many others including the Walter Carrington couple, snooper was treated to a rousing meal of pounded yam in the home of his childhood friend, Jacob Kehinde Olupona, Professor of African Traditional Religion at the Harvard School of Divinity only to be ambushed the very next day by Tayo Akinwande, a.k.a Tata, a software prodigy and Professor of Electrical Engineering at M.I.T, who could barely contain his excitement on hooking up with snooper after so many decades.

There he was, now impressively beefed up and exuding the aura of absent-minded brilliance, hollering snooper’s undergraduate nom de guerre with great relish. Snooper had been their adored leader and campus generalissimo in the department of sophomoric delinquency. Forty years later, the table turned as the leader became the led and yours sincerely barely managed to survive Tata’s onslaught at a downtown Boston bar. Sweet revenge came when our man spent about 20 minutes frantically searching for his phone. It was in his pocket all along. Oh la la, as they say.